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John the Ripper, the pre-eminent password cracking tool, is getting ready to take on 1Password. Is 1Password ready? Yes! We have been ready for a long time, but you need to do your part by having a good Master Password.

We’ve always known that that there is nothing we can do prevent someone developing an automated Master Password guessing tool that is tuned to 1Password data, and so we’ve designed our security around the assumption that such tools do exist. What we can do (and have done) is make any password guessing program work extra hard, so that it can only guess thousands of passwords per second instead of many millions per second. We also have been advising people to make sure that their 1Password Master Passwords are strong, unique, and memorable.

What’s new

Password crackers don’t break the cryptography or exploit bugs or design weaknesses. They are just programs that try millions or billions of different passwords until they either find one that works or the person running the program gives up.

John the Ripper expects the data that it works with to be in particular formats. The modifications to John the Ripper for 1Password involve two components. One converts the relevant part of the Agile Keychain Format into an appropriate input file, and the second part allows John the Ripper to test against that input file in a way that allows it to recognize a successful guess.

Let me stress again that the existence of a password cracking tool does not reflect any kind of weakness in the system it is attacking. When you have encrypted data, there is nothing stopping a person or a computer from trying to guess the password.

What’s not new

Other than repeating the fact that 1Password users should have a unique, strong, and memorable Master Password, there is nothing that we need to do with 1Password in response to the new components of John the Ripper. We have been operating under the assumption that these sorts of tools already existed, even if they hadn’t been made publicly available.

When we introduced the 1Password data format in 2008, we knew that we needed to design it to defend against crackers, so we used PBKDF2 in the process of getting from Master Password to encryption key. PBKDF2 means that a computer has to do many complicated and slow computations to derive an encryption key from a password. So you might have to wait half a second or so after entering your master password for 1Password to actually be able to unlock your data, but that is barely noticeable to someone using the system. But for an automated password cracking system, it dramatically reduces the number of possible passwords it can guess in a day. We’ve written more about how PBKDF2 works in Peanut Butter Keeps Dogs Friendly, too. Plus, last year we increased the number of PBKDF2 iterations that many versions of 1Password use when creating a new data file.

We have also been encouraging people to use good Master Passwords for their 1Password data. 1Password means that your various login passwords don’t need to be anything that you need to remember (and so it is easy for those to be strong and unique), but your 1Password Master Password is something that needs to be strong, unique, easy to remember, and reasonable to type. There is a great deal of advice on the ‘net about how to pick a good password that you can remember, but much of that advice fails to take into account the flexibility of password cracking tools. So please take a look at Toward Better Master Passwords if you haven’t already looked at that.

How fast in John the Ripper and what does it mean for your master password?

I’ve spent much of the weekend playing with the new tools in the developer versions of John the Ripper. I ran John the Ripper (JtR) against my 1Password data for about 20 minutes on my Early 2009 Mac Pro (Quad Core). John the Ripper cranked away and consumed more CPU power than I knew my machine had (see picture at right). Yet working against a 1Password data file that used 1000 PBKDF2 iterations, JtR was only able to try about 4200 password guesses per second. For my calculations in the table below, I rounded that up to 5000 guesses per second.

I also tested a data file with 28,000 PBKDF2 iterations. As expected John the Ripper was slowed down about 28 times from the case with 1000 PBKDF2 iterations. In the table I provide estimated cracking times if the data file uses 25000 PBKDF2 iterations, which should make JtR run about 25 times slower than when there are 1000 iterations. (Again, my timing data was a bit messier, but I am always rounding toward the worst case. That is, whenever there is some ambiguity or a range of results, I am always picking the estimates that would have John the Ripper be faster.)

The author of the 1Password plug-in, Dhiru Kholia, anticipates that the module will soon be modified so that it can make use of Graphic Processor Units (GPUs). This, he estimates, will increase the guessing speed by more than 100 times. In my table below, I have used a 200 times increase in speed for GPUs. So that where I had roughly 5000 guesses per second on my Mac Pro, I assume that with GPU acceleration, there will be one million guesses per second.

And finally to read the table below, you need to be reminded of how I am measuring password strength. I can only calculate the strength of a password if I know the system by which the password was created. A great deal of advice floating around about creating passwords fails to take into account that the attackers know more about how people create passwords than the people creating the passwords, and these attackers can and do tune their cracking tools accordingly. Much of the common advice also fails to take into account that people are far more predictable than we imagine. So passwords that may look really strong are often far weaker than people imagine.

If you read the advice in Toward Better Master Passwords, you will see that the recommended system is to pick words from a list truly at random (by rolling dice) and then just using that sequence of randomly chosen words as your Master Passwords. This sort of system, until it became the subject of an xkcd comic, was known as diceware.

The table below looks at Master Passwords 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 diceware words long. The entropy of those passwords are listed in bits. For an explanation of what “bits of entropy” means, take a look at The Geek Edition of the article on better master passwords.

The cracking times are the average or mean time to crack. For example if it would take 116 years to try every possible 4 word password created with the diceware scheme, then it would take on average 58 years.

Lessons

From the table you should surmise that three-word-long passwords of this sort aren’t long enough to withstand a plausible attack. You should also be able to see that anything over five words long is overkill. Or, given a Master Password with more than about 55 bits of real entropy (not the false reports that you get from most websites pretend to calculate password strength), you should be fine against any plausible attack for a long time to come.

PBKDF2 and its limits

It really is because of PBKDF2 that tools like John the Ripper will only be able to find weak Master Passwords. Its role is vital. But it is important to notice that once we have a sufficient number of PBKDF2 iterations, increasing those doesn’t add that much additional security. Going from 1000 iterations to 25000 iterations is the equivalent of adding less than 5 bits of entropy to a password, which is about the same as adding a truly random, lowercase letter to a password. Furthermore, there are continuing diminishing returns: Going from, say, 25,000 PBKDF2 iterations to 50,000 would only add the equivalent of one bit of entropy to a password.

In short, once PBKDF2 is in place with a reasonable number of iterations, you get far far more security for the effort by making your Master Password stronger.

Why doesn’t 1Password limit the number of password attempts?

Many websites or an ATM will lock someone out if they enter their password incorrectly too many times. Websites will also have a kind of back-off. After you’ve entered your password incorrectly three times in a row, it may make you wait ten minutes before it lets you try again. These are very good security measures for those sorts of services. So the question is: why don’t we do the same with unlocking 1Password?

1Password stores your encrypted data on your computer. You may use Dropbox for syncing, but when 1Password does its thing, it is always unlocking data that is on your computer. This means that if an attacker gets hold of your 1Password data (say your computer is stolen), they have the data right there. They do not need to use the 1Password software, they can go directly to the data with their own tools. Because an attacker doesn’t have to go through our software or systems we control, there is no place for using using throttling or back-off techniques. We have to build the security into the data format itself. Our use of PBKDF2 is an example of that.

More abstractly and to introduce a bit of technical jargon, your Master Password is an encryption password, not an authentication password. It is used as (or to derive) a key that decrypts something. It is not used as a mechanism to prove who you are so that you could be let into some service. The distinction is subtle, and particularly prone to confusion because, for the most part, a user shouldn’t have to know or care about it. But there are a couple of places where the distinction matters. It is part of the explanation for why 1Password doesn’t do back-off or throttling.

There is one other place that the distinction between encryption password and authentication password matters for users of 1Password. I will be writing about it more later, but in summary: it means that once you have a good 1Password Master Password, you should keep it for life. You gain no security by changing an encryption password frequently (indeed, it can hurt). So you should only change your 1Password Master Password if there is something wrong with your current one. I’ll talk more about changing passwords (when you should and when you shouldn’t) in a future article.

Should we keep our data format secret?

It’s natural to ask whether we could have made things harder for the developers of password cracking tools if we weren’t as open as we are about the design of our data format. We certainly could have made things a bit more annoying for them if we attempted to conceal details of our data format, but we couldn’t have made things harder for them in a way that would have mattered for security.

On the whole, people should be distrustful of systems that claim to gain security by having secrets known only to the developer. That approach is often called security through obscurity. It not only rarely works, but it often implies a weakness in the design. For example, if there were something that I knew about the design of 1Password that would enable me to unlock your data, then it would necessarily be the case that there is a weakness in the system. Such secrets can often be discovered by careful analysis or through the secret actually getting out from those who know it. Despite what I may have said on April Fool’s Day, proprietary encryption systems are a warning sign, not a virtue.

When talking about reports of tools that break into iPhones, it is very important to remember that the seller may be inclined to overemphasize its capabilities. It is also wise to keep in mind that the more sensational claims are the ones that tend to be picked up, and perhaps amplified, by the press. In this light, let’s talk about Micro Systemation’s XRY, a cracking/forensics tool for extracting data from iOS and Android devices.

XRY, despite its recent press attention, does not appear to represent anything new. Everything that we said in Lost iPhone? Safe passwords! still holds true. Your 1Password data remains encrypted. That is, even if an attacker gets through all of the the iOS security, including capture of the device passcode, he or she would still have to break your 1Password Master Password to get at your 1Password data.

News of XRY has been circulating since Andy Greenberg of Forbes drew attention to it and to Micro Systemation’s video demonstration. The demo shows discovery of an iPhone’s passcode in a matter of second. This should naturally cause concern for everyone who cares about their privacy.

But I’m going to try to sort out what the real concerns are, and what you can do to to better protect yourself.

Cracking passcodes

Even though your 1Password data remains protected, tools like XRY or Elcomsoft’s iOS forensic toolkit do represent a threat to the secrecy of other data stored on your device. Furthermore, most people will have weaker 1Password Master Passwords on their phones than they will on their desktop systems. This means that we do need to be a bit more concerned about what happens if people steal your encrypted 1Password data from your iOS device than if they steal your encrypted 1Password data from your desktop or Dropbox. Therefore it is worth spending a bit of time talking about device passcodes and the security of your iOS device in general.

Note that when I talk about your “device passcode” I’m talking about the passcode that is used to unlock your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch in the first place (assuming you set one, of course). I am not talking about your 1Password unlock code or master password. Those are different things. The tools described are all about breaking the device passcode and what can be done once that is available.

First, these tools jailbreak the device. This allows the user to then run a brute force attack on the device passcode. That attack must be run on the phone itself because it is tied to a unique device key. You may think that running through all of the passcodes, 0000—9999 would just take a fraction of a second, and under normal circumstances you would be absolutely correct. But Apple has protected the passcode with PBKDF2, which forces each trial to perform thousands of complex computations. Although things will differ from device to device, Apple appears to have tuned things so that it takes about one quarter of a second to process a single guess.

Without having hands on experience with XRY I can’t be absolutely certain of this, but I strongly suspect that the reason that it was able to discover the passcode so quickly in the demonstration was because the passcode was “0000”. That is, “0000” may be the first passcode it tried. At four guesses per second, it would take about 40 minutes to try all possibilities, with an average break time of 20 minutes. As we’ve seen, sometimes it can hit upon the correct guess quickly, but in other cases it may take the full 40 minutes.

Not so simple passcodes

Twenty minutes to break into your device is still too quick for many of us to be comfortable with. Fortunately it is easy to set a longer passcode on your device. Launch the Settings app and go to General > Passcode Lock. You will be asked to re-enter your passcode at this point; after all, you wouldn’t want anyone who picks up your unlocked phone to be able to fiddle with its security settings. Once you’ve done that, you will have a screen with lots of options. One is called “Simple Passcode”—switch that to “Off” (the Simple Passcode means using a simple 4-digit number). Once you switch Simple Passcode to “Off” you can have longer and more complex passcodes.

Let’s suppose that you wanted to use a six digit passcode. It would take almost three days to attempt all one million possible six digit passcodes. The average crack time would be half that, at about 35 hours. All the while, the phone needs to be attached to the attacker’s computer. For an eight digit passcode, it would take on average about four and a half months to crack. Each additional digit multiplies the attack time by ten.

If you want to use just lowercase letters and the space key, then with a five letter passcode it would take about three weeks to guess, and for six lowercase letters it would take about a year and a half on average. Each additional letter (or space) multiplies the crack time by 27.

The table below gives some sample average crack times. Assuming that your passcode is random, I count 27 possible lowercase “letters” (26 letters, plus the spacebar) and 53 mixed case “letters” (52 letters, plus the space bar). Although we don’t know how XRY guesses, Elcomsoft has previously advertised that when confronted with a non-simple passcode, their system will try some commonly used non-simple passwords first.

So what kind of passcode is right for me?

When trying to figure out what the best kind of passcode works for you, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. The first one is that for someone to launch this attack they need to be in full possession of your phone during the whole time. The attacker can’t just grab your phone briefly and then do the rest of the attack later. So you need to think realistically about how much time and effort someone would put into getting at your data.

Also remember that this is just to get at your device’s passcode. It is not about your 1Password data which is protected separately in a number of ways, including your Master Password.

You must consider how easy the passcode is for you to enter. One very convenient feature of iOS is that if your passcode is digits only, you will be presented with a numeric keypad, making it much easier and quicker to enter. Likewise, if you keep your passphrase to lowercase letters only, you don’t have to shift keyboards. The passcode that I’ve personally been using falls into the ‘months to crack’ category. Your choice may be different.

What about 1Password data?

Your 1Password data is protected by several layers, the device passcode is only one of them. iOS prevents one application from seeing the data belonging to another application on the device. This can also be a layer of defense, but it is not one which will withstand most jailbreaks.

So finally we come to your 1Password Master Password for the data on your device. This is the final layer of protection. Note that if you use a 4-digit 1Password unlock code, it is just a convenience feature to allow you to do some things within 1Password without having to enter your full Master Password; it is not intended to be a meaningful layer of security.

Put simply: you should use the longest master password on your device that you are comfortable typing regularly. If it is a real chore to type, you won’t use 1Password enough to get its security benefits. Because typing on a desktop system, an iPhone, and an iPad are very different experiences, we have set things up so that you can have a different Master Password for each. The Master Password that I use on Mac and Windows is complex enough to be entirely unusable on an iPhone. This means, however, that my Master Password on my iPhone and iPad are substantially weaker than what I use on the desktops, which brings us back to why I am concerned with overall security of iOS devices.

As we’ve often said before, security is a process, not a product. So look for further security enhancements in 1Password for iOS in the not too distant future. As usual, I don’t want to say anything more specific until this is delivered.

Other claims in reports about XRY

One the the most frightening paragraphs from the Forbes article on the XRY demo reads:

As the video shows, […] XRY can quickly crack an iOS or Android phone’s passcode, dump its data to a PC, decrypt it, and display information like the user’s GPS location, files, call logs, contacts, messages, even a log of its keystrokes.

While it is true that the demonstration video suggests that XRY can do most of that, I am far from convinced that it it actually exhibits those capabilities, at least not as stated in those words.

I have no hands-on experience with XRY or any information that isn’t publicly listed on the Micro Systemation website, so my comments here are necessarily speculative.

“Quickly crack passcodes”

As discussed above, there is absolutely no indication from the video that XRY can do much better than four guesses per second when cracking passcodes. It would be a truly major break(through) if they either found a way to defeat PBKDF2 (in which case it wouldn’t just be phones that they could go after) or discovered a way to perform these passcode trials off-line. Such breakthroughs would be widely trumpeted, and they would have been able to perform a very different demonstration. The fact that their target passcode was “0000” only reinforces my view that there is no breakthrough.

Note that they might be able to get a slightly better crack rate on an iPhone 4, running iOS 4. But iOS 5 contains mechanisms to set the PBKDF2 iterations appropriately for the hardware it is running on. It’s worth noting that they used iOS 4 on an iPhone 4 in their demonstration.

“Display user’s GPS location”

In the video we are told that they found some “google maps data”. Whether or not this is a place that the phone has been is left entirely unclear. Because there were only a couple of such data items listed, I am skeptical that it does represent actual phone locations. There also was a bit of a kerfuffle about a year ago when it was believed that Apple tracks an iPhone’s location. As it turned out, that wasn’t quite what was going on. It doesn’t appear from the video that the location data they are getting is anything like what is in the location cache database.

“dump files”

The video shows the inspection of a file called “keychain-2.db”, which seems scary enough, but there is no reason to believe that data within that file can be decrypted. However, with a sufficiently jailbroken device with the passcode in hand, it is plausible that the information in there can be decrypted. They then go on to “the log file” and show that the device passcode is in it. What may not be immediately clear is that this is log file is created from their own password cracking process.

The log file that is being read there was actually created by XRY itself. There will, of course, be sensitive data (such as contact information) available to them after a cracking the passcode, but the demonstration does not illustrate those examples.

“logs of its keystrokes”

I am not certain where the impression of a keystroke logger comes from. I saw no implication of that from the video. Perhaps it is the discovery of a swipe pattern on the Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) system that was shown. Note that there have been two major releases of Android (Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich) since the version used in the demonstration.

A large grain of salt

I am not in any way disputing that tools like XRY and the Elcomsoft toolkit can be useful for law enforcement. And I am certainly not suggesting that these shouldn’t be worrying to anyone concerned about their data and privacy. My point is simply that sensational claims about security issues need to be examined carefully. The more we examine some of the claims about XRY, the less frightening they become.

In sum

This was a long article, so I’d like to highlight a few main points

Press reports based on marketing videos are not the most reliable way to to understand security threats.

XRY, in particular, illustrates no threat that we haven’t addressed before. In particular, your 1Password data on your phone is encrypted and protected by your 1Password master password even if your phone becomes entirely compromised.

It is probably time to move beyond simple 4-digit pass codes for your iOS device. If you use a longer sequences of digits, it will still be quick and easy to enter.

For advice on what to do if your iThingy gets stolen, please see an earlier post that includes such advice.

By adopting reasonable security practices, such as using 1Password and moving beyond a 4-digit device passcode, we can enjoy on the benefits of our mobile devices without having to live in fear of what happens to our data if someone gets a hold of the device.

Update: Micro Systemation have removed their demonstration video from YouTube. Also someone more familiar with the jailbreaking technology has reported on this and points out that the tools at XRY uses do not work with the iPhone 4S, the iPad 2, or the new iPad. It also confirms my view of the password cracking time.

1Password is great for generating strong random passwords for sites without you ever having to memorize (or even see) those passwords. But there are a few passwords that we all do need to remember. I have a small number (I wish I could say just one) high security passwords that I need to remember. One, of course, is my 1Password master password.

Your 1Password master password is extremely important. Although we take steps to thwart automated password crackers you should still use a strong, memorable master password. Password cracking tools are becoming more powerful every year, and too much is at stake in your 1Password data. Given the strength of the encryption we use, your master password is likely to be the weakest link in your 1Password security. Don’t be too scared of that. Given how strong everything else is, it would be practically impossible to use and remember a master password that is actually stronger than 1Password’s encryption.

This is going to be a very long blog post, so I’d like to start out with a few points to keep in mind

We are not seeking perfection. Instead we need to find ways to improve master passwords if they aren’t currently very strong.

Many of the schemes that people (including myself) have proposed in the past suffer from a major flaw.

No matter what you read here, always keep in mind that a master password that you can’t type or remember is terrible choice of master password.

This discussion applies only to 1Password data on the desktops or stored in the cloud. Master passwords for 1Password on iOS do not need to be as strong as master passwords on the desktops. [Update: Since 1Password 4 for iOS was introduced in December 2012, the same Master Password is used on all of your devices.]

Change a weak master password, otherwise leave it be

We’ve all been told to change passwords on a regular basis, and there are still some circumstances under which that remains reasonable advice. But it is not a good idea with 1Password master passwords. Ideally you should pick a good master password at the outset and never change it.

Passwords in need of changing

Everybody knows to avoid short, common passwords or dictionary words (in any language). The world’s most common password, 123456, is, of course, terrible. But even things like Sally4th or like Molly&Patty2 (the names of my dogs) are not really strong enough for something as important as your 1Password data. The latter is just of the form NAME & NAME DIGITS which password guessing programs do get around to checking.

You can change your master password in 1Password by going to Preferences > Security and clicking on the “Change Master Password” button.

After you change your master password

It is extremely important that you learn your new master password, and you learn it through practice. Go to the Security preference pane again and set “Auto-Lock” on and to a short time. Maybe just 5 or 10 minutes. This will mean that you will have to type in your master password more frequently, but that will help you learn it. After a few days, you can then set the Auto-lock time back to something less annoying.

Also – and this may sound like heresy even though it is sound security advice – when you change your master password, you can write it down on a slip of paper and put it in your wallet. Once you no longer need to refer to it, you can destroy the piece of paper.

A walk through of a password creation system

The challenge that we face is to have master passwords that not going to be guessed by password cracking programs, yet we mere mortals are capable of remembering and typing without it being a burden.

What makes this a particular challenge is the fact that the bad guys know at least as much about how people pick passwords as we do. They are not only reading the same password picking advice that gets posted in places like this, but they have studied millions of stolen passwords.

Here is an important principle that we need to keep in mind:

The strength of a password creation system is not how many letters, digits, and symbols you end up with, but how many ways you could get a different result using the same system.

Don’t worry if this principle doesn’t make sense yet. It will should start to after I walk through an example.

I have two dogs: Molly and Patty. Suppose I wanted to make a master password from that and came up with Ihave2dogs:Molly&Patty. With that as an example, I’ll work through why that isn’t as good as it might first appear. (It looks good at first because it is long, has mixed case, and has punctuation.)

Use spaces to make things easier for you

1Password master passwords can include spaces. So you can make things easier to type and remember by using spaces (even though it adds little to the actual security). So our first improvement will be to change this to I have 2 dogs: Molly & Patty

Don’t tell the the truth

If your master password is to be based on something meaningful, remember that there are more ways to lie than to tell the truth. There are more ways for me to lie about my pets than tell the truth, and so I should use a lie. So let’s try, I have 3 bats: Larry, Moe & Curly.

Don’t make sense

There are more ways for a sentence to not make sense than to make sense. So let’s change my three bats to thirty-five bats, but still list three: I have 35 bats: Larry, Moe & Curly

Avoid predictable phrases

For those of us of a certain age and steeped in American culture, once we begin a list of names with “Larry…” following it with “Moe and Curly” is very predictable. So even though the Moe & Curly add 11 characters to the password, those 11 characters are so predictable that they add very little actual strength. Even though it is shorter, using I have 35 bats: Larry & Amy is actually stronger than I have 35 bats: Larry, Moe & Curly.

Along the same lines, the “e” after “I hav” isn’t doing much good either. Because it is easily guessable from the rest of the password it isn’t actually adding much strength. There is nothing wrong with that “e”, but I’m mentioning it to help illustrate the point that the number of ways things can be different is often more important than length itself.

Avoid secrets or things that are personally meaningful

The more personally meaningful something is to you the fewer alternatives there are. There are more things that don’t have personal meaning to you than do.

In particular avoid personal secrets. Twice in my life when I’ve been asked to find weak passwords where I worked, I had the embarrassing task of telling my friends and colleagues to change passwords that also revealed their secret crushes. Also there may be a time when you actually do need to reveal your master password to a loved one. When I spot passwords like IloveUVicky along with the owner’s email address among 26000 email addresses and password exposed from a pornography site, I certainly hope that this won’t cause too much trouble for the owner.

Obvious punctuation is obvious

Capitalizing the beginnings of words or changing “for” to “4” really doesn’t add much security. Remember, if you can think to do this, the people who write password cracking systems have already done the same. Unfortunately adding punctuation in truly random manner makes the password too hard to remember. Certainly add the obvious punctuation, but recognize that it doesn’t strengthen your password as much as it might appear.

What we’ve learned from this example

At every stage in working though this example, we made some real improvements. Remember that we are not trying to reach perfection here; we are looking instead to create better master passwords that remain usable. Do not create trouble for yourself by picking a master password that is too difficult to type or too hard to remember.

But we have also learned that human behavior really isn’t very random. The schemes we come up with can be coded into password cracking systems. A good master password is not just limited by what a human can remember, but it is also limited by what a human can create. We can get digits and punctuation into passwords easily enough, but our selection methods involve a lot of predictability. Human behavior is more predictable than we like to imagine. That predictability can be exploited in password guessing programs.

Roll the dice to avoid predictability

If people are so predictable, how can we create memorable passwords that aren’t predictable? It turns out that Arnold Reinhold published a solution to this back in 1995 to help people create strong and memorable pass phrases for PGP. It’s called Diceware.

Because words have meaning, we can remember a sequence of words even if it doesn’t create a meaningful statement. And because there are many more words than there are individual characters, selecting a random sequence of five or so words provides a hard to crack password.

Reinhold produced a list of 7776 short words or sequences (that is 65 for people who care about such things). A word can be selected from the list by rolling five dice (or rolling one die 5 times). Here is a small excerpt from the English Diceware Word List.

35443 knew
35444 knick
35445 knife
35446 knit
35451 knob
35452 knock

If you roll your dice and get the sequence 3 – 5 – 4 – 5 – 1, then your Diceword would be “knob”. Another five rolls of the dice will get your next word. If you rolled 3 – 2 – 6 – 5 – 6 then your next word would be “hike”.

The great thing about Diceware is that we know exactly how secure it is even assuming that the attacker knows the system used. The security comes from the genuine randomness of rolling the dice. Using four or five words should be sufficient against the plausible attacks over the next few years given observed speed of password crackers. [Updated October 2, 2013]

For those who really want to use this system and get the most security out of it, you should combine Diceware with your own private system. Create a short random password, including digits and symbols and use that in place of one of the dicewords in your final password. So going back to my dogs, Molly and Patty, I might create a weak password like 2dM&P, and suppose my rolls of the dice gets me cleft cam synod lacy, I could then create a master password like cleft 2dM&P cam synod lacy, which would be a very good master password. With repetition, it is something that you can learn to type quickly.

In Conclusion

I would like to remind you of some crucial points I made near the top:

We are working toward better passwords, not perfect ones. You should take only as much advice from this as you are comfortable with and no more. Remembering and typing in your master password should not become a chore.

If you do change your master password, practice with it regularly so that you don’t forget it. Don’t be afraid to write it down on a piece of paper for a while if you keep it in a safe place.

The kinds of master passwords that you need depend on who may try to break it. Even though a typical criminal may have access to sophisticated cracking tools, it is unlikely that they will dedicate hours – much less days, weeks, years or decades – to your particular data.

Related (later) articles

This article was followed up by a geek edition which discussed an XKCD comic and some of the mathematical concepts behind this.